Sun Servers with Flash Solid State Disks

Sun Microsystems has now come out with a series of Flash-powered servers and storage devices.

Sun has released its T6320/40 and X6240/6450 series of blade servers with speedy Flash solid state disks (SSDs). Even the series T51xx/52xx/54xx SPARC and Fire series X41xx/42xx/44xx servers have SSDs, along with additional storage expansion arrays and unified storage devices.

Sun's Flash Storage overview page also provides a Flash Analyzer download that should help in measuring Flash system performance. Its free Java software license doesn't allow for adding or distributing classes, but is for commercial use.

Sun Microsystems has dropped three new Linux servers on the market: a storage module with 1.2 TBytes, a blade module with two AMD Opteron Quadcores and a blade server with two Intel Xeon Quadcores. A photo gallery shows them in detail.

Whirring machines with rotating stacks of disks are out. The elegant tablets and smartphones of today’s digital generation house flash memory that saves space and energy. We explain the characteristics of flash chips and suggest appropriate Linux filesystems.